Why I love Games

Op-Ed — Now You’re Speaking My Language — A friend and ex-coworker of mine told me they’d never met anyone who loves or knows as much about games as me (while flattering, I’m sure there are many who know more. Still, I took it as a compliment). He suggested I write about why I love games so much. I’d been sitting on this for a bit but it felt like it was time to give it it’s due, hopefully without being too self indulgent

My house was filled with games as a kid. My parents played card games (still do!), board games, and encouraged playing sports. We started with simple card games (Go Fish!, Old Maid) and children’s board games (Candyland!, Chutes and Ladders, Clue, Guess Who?, etc). My dad was part of a weekly poker game for ~30 years that ran until the mid 2000s. I learned poker at an early age (it’s probably why I still like games of deception to this day). My dad grew up in Ohio and everyone on his side of the family played Euchre, which I was required to learn at an early age. Where poker taught me to read people, Euchre was light and social (and, importantly, where family drama was discussed). It’s still a mainstay whenever 4 family members are together

Simultaneously, I got introduced to the video game market post 83 crash. I got the Texas Instruments TI-99 Home Computer with Munch Man (think Pac-Man but in reverse). We even got the Atari on the cheap post E.T. burial. I remember not being able to sleep after seeing the movie Clue, and being up at 3AM playing Dig-Dug

In 86, I convinced my grandparents to get me the NES Deluxe (I still have it and the box). My grandma knew she didn’t have much time left and wanted to make it count. That meant every visit to Louisville was accompanied by a trip to Thornberries, the toy store (after the NES incident, there was a parent chaperone). My grandma was great! Over the subsequent years the NES was transformative. It was something both solo and social. Friends would gather to play, no matter whose house it was. Zelda, Metroid, Mario, Mega Man, Contra to more obscure stuff like Anticipation, Raid on Bungeling Bay, Shadowgate, Rygar, Faxanadu, etc were hugely inspirational. My friend Steve and I started creating worlds, storyboards, and I was drawing out levels and inventing mechanics

Both physical and video games taught me specific skills. Board/card games instilled strategic thinking, socialization, and deception. Conversely, video games brought critical thinking while expanding thoughts of fantasy, narrative, and world building. Both had elements of risk/reward (as did skateboarding and bridge jumping as a teenager)

Board/card games and video games continued to mature and require more skill and thought over the years. Games like Dungeons and Dragons were a feast for the imagination while Magic the Gathering was a combination of those skills from card games of old with the fantasy that permeated video game lore. Everything was coming together. As the market grew, I explored new genres, themes, and gameplay modalities burning experiences into my brain that might well flash before my eyes at the moment of death

Without creating a larger, bloated chronicle of game playing over the years or getting more lost in the weeds, let me come back to the point. Which is, “why do I love games?” Games teach us rules and let us adhere to, bend, and break them. They let us compete individually or as a team. With the breadth of worlds available, we can exist out of time and space in any sort of world we might want. We can build empires and destroy cities; be the hero, villain, or a farmer. Games are the truest expression of fantasy and wish fulfillment that has ever existed on the planet. They’re a combination of art and science (perhaps a little too much science these days)

More than any of those things, however, games are several communities of people gathered together through play. They are a shared language whose prose have threaded throughout worldwide culture

I’ve been playing games my whole life. Their importance is more than a market size, fantasy universe, or game genre. They are fundamental to the human experience. You can learn a lot about people from the games we play and the way they are played. So “Why do I love games?” Because they are a window into our souls, whose reflections tell our stories weaving fantastic adventure in fantasy realms or grounding things in reality. Here players express themselves through action. No other form of media does that quite the same